Episode III

Oh, dash away if you don't want any spoilers, although it's not like I'm about to rehash the plot or quote any "dialogue". (Picture that I said that with Dr. Evil quotation marks.) But I am about to talk about several points that are clearly spoilers.

I'm just so torn. I'm glad it's over. I'm sorry that there was, of necessity, not as much suspense as there ideally would have been...mostly because there were many people I just plain old knew were going to survive.

The suspense had to be in the hows, not the whats or the whos. I wish the motivations would have been better. I wish I'd felt it more deeply. I wish ass-kickin' Padme from the end of Episode I, the woman who was Leia's mother, hadn't turned out to be such a weepy, oh-hell-I-give-up kind of girl.

I mean, I love Tom more than my own life. More than anything. But if something happened to him, I would hope that I wouldn't just lie down and give up. I might feel like it, but for goodness' sake, if you have two new babies to live for, you don't just give up and die because your man turned himself into a monster, using you as an excuse for doing so.

It just took one thing to make me walk out of there with a quiet smile on my face, and it's John Williams who did it. Baby Leia going to Alderaan with (my favorite piece of music from the original trilogy) Leia's Theme playing underneath, and then morphing to Luke's Theme when Obi-Wan delivers Luke to Owen and Beru.

I think it was Leia who formed one of my earliest ideas of what I might want to be like as a woman, the first idea independent from the women I knew and grew up with, like my mother. How disappointing, in a way, to see the lack of strength Leia apparently came from. Her father was so weak that he was quite easily manipulated into pure evil, and her mother simply shrugged her shoulders and gave up. Maybe that makes Leia all the stronger, all the better for coming from those genetics and managing to kick ass through all three movies.

I don't know. I wish I could encapsulate it. It's over. Maybe that's all I can say right now.